The newest system is the “Vesta” system (and you can see Pak Lui, the HPC Advisory Council HPC Center Manager standing next to it in the picture below). Vesta consist of six Dell™ PowerEdge™ R815 nodes, each with four processors AMD Opteron 6172 (Magny-Cours) which mean 48 Cores per node and 288 cores for the entire system. The networking was provided by Mellanox, and we have plugged two adapters per node (Mellanox ConnectX®-2 40Gb/s InfiniBand adapters). All nodes are connected via Mellanox 36-Port 40Gb/s InfiniBand Switch. Furthermore, each node has 128 GB, 1333 MHz memory to make sure we can really get the highest performance from this system.

Microsoft has provided us with Windows HPC 2008 v3 preview, so we can check the performance gain versus v2 for example. The system is capable of dual boot – Windows and Linux, and is now available for testing. If you would like to get access, just fill the form on the URL above.

In the picture – Pak Lui standing next to Vesta

I want to thank Dell, AMD and Mellanox for providing this system to the council!

This week the 32nd HPC User Forum was held in Roanoke, Virginia. This was a great opportunity to meet, talk and hear from industry experts and end-users. There were very interesting sessions on the state of high-performance computing, the current problems, and what work is necessary to move to exascale computing. It was also a great opportunity to meet many of the HPC Advisory Council members.

The HPC Advisory Council had a session during the HPC User Forum, and I would like to thank the members that participated in the panel, and in particular to Jennifer Koerv (AMD), Donnie Bell (Dell), Sharan Kalwani (GM), Lynn Lewis (Microsoft), Stan Posey (Panasas), Lee Porter (ParTec) and Arend Dittmer (Penguin Computing).

Some of the talks at the User Forum were on HPC futures, not only on building the next PetaScale/ExaScale supercomputers, but how to make HPC easier and more productive. Platform Computing talked on HPC in a cloud and services, and NVIDIA on using GPUs. This is one of the main research activities right now in the HPC Advisory Council – enabling efficient HPC as a Service (HPCaaS) and smart scheduling strategies. Initial results are available on the HPC Advisory Council web, and you are encouraged to take a look (the focus at the event was on bioscience applications). We will extend the research to add QCD codes (quantum chemistry), with the help and support from Fermi National Lab.

We are having our first member’s conference call on May 4th, so don’t forget to accept the invite that you got, and if you did not get it, please let me know at hpc@mellanox.com.